REFUTATION
Not only will your careful analysis of the question formulate your own
argument, but it will prepare you to refute that of your opponent. Put
just as much care into this part of your preparation as into any other.
State to yourself his probable points just as strongly and clearly as
you can. If you can put his case better than he, when you come to your
refutation, so much the better, provided you are equipped to answer
adequately. Of course you can’t spend time enough to answer every point
he has made—make up your mind which are the essential ones and strike at
them. This selection will be comparatively simple if you have properly
analyzed your question in the first place, but will be impossible if you
have slighted that part of your work.
Do not be misled, however, into thinking that refutation itself is
easy or of slight importance. It is neither. It calls for the exercise
of all of your skill in selecting the essentials and ignoring the
non-essentials. The young debater, moreover, is often impaled upon one or
the other horn of the dilemma—too much or too little. If you see no side
of the case but your own, your beautifully constructed argument may fall
to pieces when your opponent, perhaps using some unpretentious fact which
you, in your innocence, had entirely overlooked, knocks out the keystone
of your arch of logic and your structure falls to ruin. On the other
hand, you may demolish one after the other of your opponent’s positions
and yet present no counter claims for your own side of the case. If you
prove your opponent to be all wrong, you do not thereby prove yourself
all right. You must establish your own position and not content yourself
merely with destroying that of your enemy—you must be constructive as
well as destructive.
Here again the analogy between debate and the later debate of life runs
close and sure. The man who in the activity of his group—whether his
lodge, his club, his society, his church, his city, or his State—has
nothing but criticism to offer is of but little value. It is easy to say
“you can’t, you can’t.” Such a statement is as valueless as it is easy.
One most important tactical reason for a constructive argument of your
own is that you can never tell whether you have destroyed all of the
enemy’s bridges. One forgotten approach may turn the position you fancied
was impregnable into a trap from which there is no escape. You must
remember further that in debate the question is as a rule a comparative
one only; neither side is wholly in the right. For example when the case
as stated lay between Peary and Amundson, or between Peary and Stanley,
if you content yourself with disproving the claims of Amundson or Stanley
_without establishing the rights of Peary_, you might so discredit the
whole argument that to the mind of your judges the fame of some unnamed
third person like Livingstone, or Du Chaillu or Kane or even Dr. Cook
might intervene to give the decision to your opponent.
The skillful debater will, therefore, develop his campaign along two
parallel lines; he will demolish the defenses of his enemy with one
battery of arguments while he is advancing his own position with another
arm of the service marching under the flag labeled Q. E. D.
The place of refutation in your argument, although essential, cannot be
dictated. It will depend largely upon the course the debate takes. I can
make certain useful suggestions, however.
Obviously you cannot refute until there is something to refute. If your
audience—and your judges—is entirely impartial and unprejudiced, if you
do not have to combat a preconceived position, you can probably safely
content yourself with advancing your own position and leave the rebuttal
of your opponent’s arguments until later. But if you are presenting some
novel proposition or some unpopular idea which cannot be entertained
unless certain hostile ideas are cleared away, you will win better
attention if you demolish the fundamental ideas upon which the old theory
rests before you present your constructive argument.
=Rebuttal.=—In rebuttal—which is simply refutation in action—you can
readily give to your whole debate, or at least your side of it, a unity
which might otherwise be lacking. You relate your work to the work of
your comrades and to that of your opponents. You select his strong
points; you minimize his weak ones. You shape his position into that form
which best suits your views while at the same time you are advancing
to your own attack. But to carry the military figure a little further,
while you must therefore be prepared with a thorough knowledge of your
opponent’s defenses, of his equipment of arguments, and, if possible,
of facts, while you should have almost a foreknowledge of his probable
lines of approach, you must always be capable of a quick shifting of
your own position as he in turn varies his attack upon you. For be sure
he will not be content to stand up and be fired at—you must be alert
and resourceful and ready to meet any change of front on his part. The
skillful debater will not be content unless he is prepared to meet any
attack which may be made upon him.
Be sure, however, to have yourself so well in hand that your refutation
will be as well organized as your constructive argument. More than
that, you should not allow any acute break to appear between the two.
What happened in a recent college debate in the East is an excellent
demonstration of what should not be done. Neither the audience nor the
judges had been told what was coming, and all were surprised when four
minutes after each speaker began (he had twelve minutes in all) a bell
rang. Instantly over the face of the speaker, as one of the judges told
me, came a sort of “Thank Heaven” expression, and he forthwith swung
off into a well-prepared argument on the constructive side of the case.
Evidently each had been told to rebut for four minutes and then argue. To
be sure that he would know where to stop the one and begin the other, the
bell signal was arranged. The effect was ludicrous in the extreme.
There are four special kinds of rebuttal which you can use.
=Reductio ad Absurdum.=—If, for illustration, your opponent, in debating
the question of child labor, insists that there is a certain nimbleness
and quickness of the fingers in children which is necessary to the
performance of certain industrial processes, you can well answer that if
that is true of children of from fourteen to sixteen it is obviously more
true of the age twelve to fourteen and so children of that age should
be employed. If this deduction follows, you can argue, then it must be
equally true of age ten to twelve and so on even to younger ages yet.
If your opponent should question the soundness of this deduction, you
could still further confound him by replying that when the employment of
children of those ages was under discussion, _those identical arguments
were advanced in its support_.
=Enforcing the Consequences.=—If, for example, in discussing
conservation, if your opponent insists that a free and unrestricted
cutting of timber should be allowed, you can show the result of such
complete liberty, if carried to its logical results—the denuding of the
United States of all its timber. It is not necessary, in urging either
this form of rebuttal nor the one which has just preceded it, that the
result be probable. It is enough for the result to be possible.
=The Dilemma.=—In this method of refutation you show your opponent
has only two arguments to advance, that neither of them is true and
that therefore his case falls unproved. No better illustration of the
effectiveness of this method can be given than a reference to the
historic Lincoln-Douglas debates. You will remember that Douglas declared
he believed both in squatter sovereignty and in the Dred Scott decision.
The one said that the people of any territory had the right to decide
for themselves whether they would or would not exclude slavery, while
the Dred Scott decision meant that a slaveholder could recover his slave
in any territory into which he might escape. You see the two positions
are logically inconsistent. When, therefore, Lincoln asked Douglas as
he did in these debates, this question, “Can the people of a territory,
prior to the formation of a state constitution, in any lawful way exclude
slavery?” Douglas was compelled to face a perfect dilemma. If he answered
“yes” he would repudiate the Dred Scott decision—he wanted the support
of the South. If he answered “no,” he would repudiate the doctrine of
squatter sovereignty and offend the North. In endeavoring to meet the
difficulty, he maintained that while a territory could not exclude
slavery it could legally enact such unfriendly legislation that it would
be impossible for slavery to remain. Lincoln practically had Douglas
defeated before the judges of that debate—the American people—when he
showed the absurdity of Douglas’ attempted escape from his dilemma.
Lincoln showed that in effect Douglas said that slavery could lawfully be
excluded from a place where it had a lawful right to be. The debate—and
this famous “dilemma” was the spectacular part of it—made Lincoln
president.
=Residues.=—This method is simply an enlargement of the difficulties of
the dilemma. When more than two possibilities are presented and you
demolish one after the other of them your hope is that nothing may be
left of his case—that the residuum may be zero.
=Analyze Your Opponent’s Case.=—As your opponent is speaking, note his
points with care. Apply to them the principles we have discussed in
earlier chapters.
Is his reasoning based upon premises which you can disprove?
Has he ignored the real issue?
Are his alleged causes merely coincidences, or are there other
contributing causes which lessen the force of his conclusion?
Is his observation of facts faulty and are his generalizations unsound
and based upon insufficient and unfair instances?
Apply these tests to his arguments and you will render your task of
refutation easier. But in your refutation, be sure you refute. Don’t
think for a minute that either heat or violence or sarcasm is a good
answer. Neither can the testimony of one witness be rebutted by that of
another unless the latter’s knowledge of the matter is shown to be the
greater. And the strength of refutation lies in the skill with which you
make your audience believe your witnesses are more worthy of belief than
those of your opponent, provided always that is the fact.